Huskies, Locker hear message, get season back on track

As I wrote earlier this week, it wasn’t the 1-2 record of the Huskies that had everyone concerned, it was the way UW arrived at that record that was troubling.

BYU hasn’t just not won a game since the week 1 victory over the Huskies, it has been historically bad, dropping it’s next four by jaw-dropping margins. Nebraska didn’t just beat Steve Sarkisian and his squad, it embarrased the Huskies in every manner, rushing for almost 400 yards and forcing Jake Locker into the worst game of his career.

After the game, Sarkisian openly called out his team for not trying hard enough in the second half against the Cornhuskers. He promised that his team would never again show such a lack of effort.

Two weeks and another final drive against USC later, Erik Folk capped off a 32-31 victory for the Huskies that showed Sarkisian’s players got the message.

After a bye week, it was not clear which Huskies team would show up. The team that romped in the second half against Syracuse? Or the mistake-riddled squad that could barely figure out which Nebraska player had the ball in his hands?

As it turned out, it was a mixture of the two. Washington was far from perfect, giving up almost 300 yards rushing and making mistake after mistake on offense. But when it mattered, the Huskies stepped up, which turned what could have been another disheartening loss into an emphatic victory.

Leading the way was Jake Locker, the quarterback who turned in a 4 for 20 performance against Nebraska and went from the consensus number one overall pick in the 2011 draft to a maligned, “project” player who was rated third this week by ESPN draft experts. Locker threw for 310 yards, rushed for another 111, and converted crucial third and fourth-downs throughout the game. On the final, game-winning drive, Locker calmly converted a fourth down pass to D’Andre Goodwin and then scrambled for a conversion on a third-and-5 that essentially set up the game-winning kick.

What was perhaps most impressive in the win was not just the way the Huskies converted in the latter minutes of the game, but how they moved past their mistakes. Locker watched his receivers drop crucial passes in the second half after he missed a few conversions of his own with poor passes. But after his favorite target, Jermaine Kearse, dropped his third pass of the game and put the Huskies in a fourth-and-10 hole with just over two minutes left in the game, Locker stepped up into the pocket and hit Goodwin to keep the drive alive. Four plays later, Locker, who fumbled through the end zone after a big run in the first half, went around the corner for eight yards to put Erik Folk in comfort territory for the winning kick.

After losing by five touchdowns to Nebraska two weeks ago and then suffering through dropped passes, more missed tackles, and a crucial fumble, the Huskies seemed a prime candidate to fold against USC. But a sign of how the team banded together came just before Folk’s game-winning kick, when Locker and Kearse, who looked like they were not on the same page all night, linked arms with smiles on their faces and braced for the kick to go up.

A week after they did nothing right, the Huskies again made plenty of mistakes. But instead of folding against another top-20 opponent, Washington banded together when it mattered most. Only a crazy person would predict that this win against USC proved that the Huskies have fixed all their problems. But, at least for one week, Washington proved it is capable of overcoming them.